5733z CPU upgrade to i7 640M etc

I was recently given an 'unuseable' 5733z with 2GHz P6100 cpu, 4GB RAM and an old and slow 640GB HD.

It seemed like a nice challenge to see how far I could speed the system up, plus I had someone in dire need of a laptop (and very little money) waiting in the wings.

The laptop had W7 and licenced Office software so upgrading to W10 and preserving the Office 2007 and 2010 mixed apps was essential.

I had a spare 128GB Samsung 830 SSD available as I'm tending to migrate folks off older, smaller OS only SSDs.

Crucial provided a pair of 4GB DDR3 DIMMs for less that the offer prices for secondhand on ebay. I also ordered a used i7 640M on ebay. (This was damaged in transit with a pin bent due to being packed pin down onto hard foam, but I was able to straighten out the bent pin).

After upgrading to the latest BIOS from Acer support I did things in the following order, dictated mainly by the availability of the bits. 1) Installed SSD using Acronis to copy the data 2) Upgraded to W10 3) Upgraded RAM 4) Upgraded CPU (see youtube for 5733 stripdown videos) 5) Put in new keyboard as old one was very sticky and full of crumbs

Overall things went very smoothly (ignoring the bent cpu pin). The only point to particularly note is that to force the install of the correct cpu driver after installing the new cpu it is necessary to go into device manager and force uninstall the P6100 driver, followed by a reboot.

The laptop runs very sweetly now. The big performance jumps came from the SSD and new cpu, although it is important to have a balanced set of upgrades to get the full useability benefits.

The only potential upgrade remaining is the wifi card, but as its a single antenna system by default and the recipient isn't interested in network performance I'm not bothering with that.